About Ryan Conklin

I never set out to become a spiritual teacher.

I still don’t consider myself one.

I’m a writer, a creative, a father, a son, a person who has made mistakes, carried wounds, questioned what he believed, wandered into his own darkness, and—every so often—found a little more light waiting there.

My Soul to See grew from that journey.

I was raised primarily by a young single mother who was only twenty when she was trying to build a life for both of us. My father was more nomadic—a free spirit who wasn’t yet ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood.

For a long time, I viewed parts of my childhood through the lens of what I didn’t receive.

Age has changed that.

So has forgiveness.

Today, I can see that both of my parents gave me something essential.

From my mother, I learned love, compassion, hard work, resilience, and what it looks like to keep going when life gives you every reason not to.

From my father, I inherited humor, curiosity, authenticity, a willingness to be a little weird, and perhaps most importantly, the instinct to question things rather than accepting the world exactly as it is presented to me.

Their strengths shaped me.

Their imperfections shaped me too.

And eventually I began to understand that perhaps both were necessary.

I grew up pigeon-toed with an irregular gait.

Kids noticed.

“Crazy Legs Conklin” was one of the names that followed me.

As a boy, I became so conscious of the way I walked that I would stare at my feet on the way to school and count my steps, trying to make myself walk like everyone else.

I couldn’t have known then how fitting that would become.

Much of my life has been spent thinking about the way we walk through this world.

Where we’re going.

What we’re carrying.

Why our path looks different from someone else’s.

And whether the parts of ourselves we spend years trying to correct might actually have something to teach us.

Physical pain would continue to be one of my teachers. Injuries, surgeries and years of living inside a body that didn’t always cooperate forced me inward long before I understood what going inward meant.

Sometimes the mountain chooses us before we choose the mountain.

When I was young, I drowned.

I was pulled beneath the water and reached a point where fighting no longer seemed possible.

And then something happened that I have spent much of my life trying to understand.

I experienced myself outside my body.

I watched the scene from somewhere else.

I remember light.

I remember an overwhelming presence.

And I remember understanding that it wasn’t my time yet.

I came back.

Whether someone interprets an experience like that spiritually, psychologically, biologically, or in some way we don’t yet have language for doesn’t concern me very much.

I know what I experienced.

And I know that afterward, the world never felt quite as solid as it had before.

I’ve often felt as though I live somewhere on a bridge between the physical world and something just beyond it.

That experience didn’t give me answers.

It gave me questions.

Those questions have followed me ever since.

My grandmother Fern was one of the first people who taught me that faith and curiosity didn’t have to be enemies.

She believed deeply in God, but she also thought deeply about what belief meant.

Through her, I began exploring spirituality, philosophy, religion and our relationship with something greater than ourselves.

But My Soul to See isn’t an attempt to tell anyone what that something is.

I don’t believe I have that authority.

The older I become, the less interested I am in pretending that I’ve figured everything out.

I’m more interested in remembering.

In looking into the mirror.

In walking into the cave.

In climbing the mountain.

In examining the things we’ve labeled wounds and asking whether some of them might eventually become windows.

And in considering the possibility that the light we’re searching for may not be somewhere at the end of the road.

Maybe some part of it has been traveling with us all along.

I am not the finished version of myself.

I’ve lived from love, and I’ve lived from fear.

I’ve been compassionate and selfish. Certain and completely lost. I’ve hurt people. I’ve been hurt. I’ve found pieces of myself I was proud of and others I would have preferred not to see.

But I’ve learned not to turn away from the mirror quite as quickly.

That’s really what this book is about.

Not perfection.

Not enlightenment.

Not arriving at the top of some spiritual mountain and telling everyone else how to climb it.

It’s about becoming curious enough to look inward and compassionate enough to accept what we find there.

My Soul to See is simply what I discovered while doing that for myself.

Your mountain will be different.

Your wounds will be different.

Your understanding of God, consciousness, the soul—or whether any of those things exist at all—may be different from mine.

That’s okay.

I don’t want my words to become your truth.

I’d rather they become a lantern sitting beside your path long enough for you to see a little farther down the road.

And then you can pick up your own light and keep walking.